Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Our reader, Gould, pointed us to these gorgeous new DVD packages from Criterion. Thank you, Gould!

Vampyr, a 1932 film by Carl Theodor Dreyer, concerns an occult student assailed by various supernatural haunts and local evildoers at an inn outside Paris. A host of stunning camera and editing tricks and densely layered sounds create a mood of dreamlike terror. With its roiling fogs, ominous scythes, and foreboding echoes, Vampyr is one of cinema's great nightmares.

High and Low is a 1962 Akira Kurosawa film adaptied frrom Ed McBain's detective novel King's Ransom. Kurosawa moves effortlessly from compelling race-against-time thriller to exacting social commentary, creating a diabolical treatise on class and contemporary Japanese society.

Trafic, a 1971 film by Jacques Tati, is the final Monsieur Hulot film. It is a masterful demonstration of the comic genius’s expert timing and sidesplitting visual gags, and a bemused last look at technology run amok.